Sun Joins the Free Software Foundation

RLiegh writes "Ars Technica reports that Sun has joined the FSF Corporate Patron program. The article explains that the FSF corporate program allows companies to provide financial assistance to the FSF in return for license consulting services. The article goes on to observe that this move is doubtlessly motivated by Sun's interest in GPL3's direction. Now that Sun has opened up Java and become an FSF corporate sponsor...could the move to dual license OpenSolaris under the GPL3 be far behind?"

Comments

YuO fail it!

[Anonymous Coward]

and- promo7es our

Sun Should Stick to Java.

[czfqnr]

I have worked with Sun products since 1994. When I first started using them they were
great, and the processing capabilities and hardware reliability were superb.

But since 2002, there has been a significant decline in their hardware offerings.

They're selling products like the V1280 to markets that have no place for them.
Why would I put my very large OLTP database with 20+ TB of data on a V1280 cluster
with just 5 PCI slots? Yeah the 12 CPUs is great, but I cannot even drive the I/O.
Yet Sun sales reps continued to push them at the time. I'm reminded of this when they tell me
to buy now the miracle T-2000 that will solve all my worldly problems.

Then, there's the mysterious cover-ups behind the fact that V1280s' system boards
are very faulty. The answers I get from Sun regarding hardware replacements are,
"Well our Parts Depots are fully stocked, so we probably don't have a problem"

Then there's the Fujitsu factor. They're supposed to be partners and sell each others
equipment, but do you ever hear a Sun sales rep say, "yeah you should probably get a Primepower
650 for that, instead of a V440", or you'll hear "Yeah T2000 is better than a Primepower 850,
you should get that"

Sun is using that relationship to get them to their next processor level. But I'm not holding
my breath for that. Because it will be another seemingly endless line of non-scalable "you should
buy 10 of these and cluster them" solutions.

As for me, I'm going Big Iron. And consolidating all of my stuff. I leave the name of the platform
out to protect the innocent. Hint: It doesn't use containers or zones, and it's been doing virtualization
long before Sun or VMWare.

I like Java, it's a good programming language full of possibilities. My advice, stick to software Sun.